10 Game-Changing Facts About the Super Nintendo

BY Jay Serafino

September 27, 2017

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After dominating the video game landscape throughout much of the ‘80s with the NES, Nintendo needed to start the new decade with a more advanced console, one that would reinvent old favorites and give birth to completely new franchises. The world wouldn't have to wait long.

In November 1990, gamers in Japan got their hands on the company’s latest marvel, the Super Famicom; the following August, it was released in North America as the Super Nintendo. It was an instant success, becoming Nintendo’s third-best-selling home console (not counting handhelds) with the help of an impressive game library that included Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Donkey Kong Country.

As the company revisits one of its most prosperous periods with the release of the SNES Classic Edition on September 29, we’re looking back at 10 facts about the Super Nintendo.

1. IT WAS LATE TO THE 16-BIT PARTY.

Though the Super Nintendo won the 16-bit console war, the system certainly took its time getting to the battlefield. It was the summer of 1989 when the Sega Genesis was released, and for two years this pixelated juggernaut had the next-gen consumer base all to itself.

Nintendo, on the other hand, was in no rush. The NES was still selling incredibly well in North America, so the idea of a Super Nintendo wasn’t the first thing on the company’s mind. Soon enough, that dominance started to slip, most notably when Sega struck gold with its Sonic series in 1991. It may have been late, but the SNES quickly started taking back its dominant share of the marketplace once it hit stores.

When the console war was over, the SNES had sold 49.1 million units around the globe, compared to the Sega Genesis’s 29 million. While impressive, the system sold considerably fewer units than its predecessor, the NES, which came in around 61 million. Its two successors, the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, would each sell less than the SNES. Only the Wii packed enough punch to dominate an entire home console generation again, topping out at more than 101 million sold. (And please note a young Paul Rudd playing the role of Fascinated Gamer in the SNES commercial above.)

2.THE NORTH AMERICAN MODEL WAS DESIGNED TO HAVE A BIT MORE HEFT THAN THE JAPANESE ONE.

North America's SNES model is, well, not pretty. It’s about the games, after all, so you can excuse the fact that the system has all the charm of a first-generation VCR. But it looks noticeably clunky when compared to the smoother and more colorful Japanese version.

A lot of thought went into that grey and purple brick from your childhood, though. Nintendo of America product designer Lance Barr was tasked with making an SNES model for American audiences, and he had a clear vision of what he wanted. Upon seeing the Super Famicom, he decreed that they looked like bags of bread when stacked up and didn’t have enough of an edge. This led to the system looking like a hefty piece of electronic hardware in the U.S., complete with sharp corners and utilitarian design. A smaller, lighter redesign would later be released toward the end of the SNES's life.

3. THERE WERE ONLY THREE GAMES AVAILABLE AT LAUNCH.

Video game launches today are massive undertakings. Stores across the globe will open at midnight and welcome a flood of ravenous gamers who have their eyes on not only a brand-new system, but also the obligatory library of games that can be purchased with it. In 2017, the Nintendo Switch launched with around a dozen games, and in 2013, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One each launched with more than 20 games on day one.

So what about the Super Nintendo? When it finally hit Japanese store shelves in November 1990, the system had only three games: F-Zero, Pilotwings, and Super Mario World, which came with the system. More games soon followed, but on that first day, that was all customers had to look forward to. American gamers had a similar selection when the system hit shelves in the West in August 1991, with only Gradius III and Sim City added to the list.

Just a few years later, the Nintendo 64 fared even worse, with a launch lineup of only Super Mario 64 and (for the sake of symmetry) Pilotwings 64.

4. SUPER MARIO WORLD IS THE SYSTEM’S BESTSELLING GAME.

If 1985’s Super Mario Bros. proved that the portly plumber was destined to be Nintendo’s mascot, Super Mario World on the SNES cemented him as the capo of the entire video game industry. With the help of a launch-day release date, and the fact that it was a pack-in title sold as a bundle with the new system, Super Mario World became the Super Nintendo’s bestselling game.

The title opened up a far more colorful and elaborate world for players to traverse through, serving as an introduction to the powerful system. It also included the debut of Yoshi, which was based off an idea that Shigeru Miyamoto had as far back as the first Super Mario game back on the NES. With the SNES’s powerful new engine, the little green dino finally became a reality.

With more than 20 million units sold, the game outpaced the next best-selling game—Super Mario All-Stars—by about 10 million copies. That was followed by Donkey Kong Country in third place at over 9 million sold, Super Mario Kart in fourth with more than 8.5 million, and Street Fighter II: The World Warrior in fifth with around 6.3 million units sold.

5. IT HAD A SATELLITE MODEM PERIPHERAL IN JAPAN.

For every Nintendo success story, there’s a failed—if not charming—experiment left to rot in gaming’s great digital graveyard. You probably know all about the Virtual Boy, the Power Glove, and ol’ R.O.B., but one of the company’s more interesting misfires was the Satellaview.

Released only in Japan, this add-on would interact with a satellite provided by the radio company St.GIGA, in which Nintendo had purchased a stake. The idea was basically an early form of online gaming and downloadable content.

The Satellaview device was used in conjunction with the Super Famicom’s expansion port at the bottom of the system. Similar to satellite TV technology at the time, this peripheral allowed gamers to put the BS-X (Broadcast Satellaview X) cartridge into their machine, which acted as a central hub. From there, fans could download exclusive games (released episodically), magazines, and other materials onto memory packs. The material would stay on the memory device until the next wave of content rewrote it.

There was a problem, though. You could only download these games during certain times, because St.GIGA would spend the rest of the day using its satellite for radio and TV. If you missed the window, you might have missed your chance of ever playing a certain game. Couple this with the price of the equipment and the subscription fee and you have an add-on that likely proved too costly and too advanced to catch on with the average gamer.

6. THE CONSOLE IS PRONE TO TURNING YELLOW.

No, it wasn’t just you; chances are pretty much everyone on your block growing up had a Super Nintendo that began to turn yellow after a while. Though it wasn’t dangerous, nor was it a sign that your console would soon become a very expensive paperweight, it was a widespread problem caused by the company’s choice of plastic.

In an article on Vintage Computing, author Benj Edwards interviewed Dr. Rudolph D. Deanin, of the Plastics Engineering program at the University of Massachusetts, for clarification on why this may happen.

“The plastics most commonly used to make the structural cases for electronic equipment are polypropylene, impact styrene, and ABS,” Deanin explained. “These all tend to discolor and embrittle gradually when exposed to UV and/or heat. They become oxidized and develop conjugated unsaturation, which produces color. They crosslink or degrade, which causes brittleness.”

Vintage Computing also dug up an old Nintendo customer service reply regarding the yellowing, which they explained was due to using plastics with flame-retardant chemicals. So, if you have an old Super Nintendo that’s looking a little jaundiced, don’t start questioning your cleanliness. It’s a natural part of the system’s aging process—beautiful in its own way.

As gaming was taking the leap into 3D, Nintendo teamed up with British-based Argonaut Games to create a new chip to install directly into cartridges that would effectively beef up their graphical power and make things like object rotation, texture mapping, and lighting all much more sophisticated.

Called the Super FX chip—or Mario FX during development—this chip didn’t force gamers to buy a new console or add-on device like Sega did with the 32X. Instead, the chip was already in the game, meaning if you didn’t care about the technical mumbo jumbo, you would never even notice.

The chip was only used in a handful of games over the console’s remaining lifespan, but a couple of them are among the system’s best, including 1993’s Star Fox and 1995’s Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, which used an enhanced Super FX2 chip.

For reasons that aren’t completely clear—aside from being completely Nintendo-y types of decisions—none of the Super FX games have been released on the company’s virtual consoles. However, they will see their first-ever re-release on the Super Nintendo Classic Edition.

8. YOSHI’S ISLAND WAS ORIGINALLY REJECTED.

Donkey Kong Country changed everything when it hit shelves in 1994. The title’s use of highly detailed, pre-rendered graphics was a revelation at the time, and it helped the game become one of the console’s top sellers. The game’s unique look was something the company wanted to capitalize on, but it almost came at the expense of one of the SNES’s most popular games, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island.

When Yoshi’s Island’s producer—and Mario creator—Shigeru Miyamoto unveiled the game to the company, his brightly colored, cartoony graphics were rejected by the marketing department. They wanted something more akin to what developer Rare did with Donkey Kong, not the type of visuals that Miyamoto was going for.

Miyamoto doubled-down on his vision, retooling Yoshi’s Island’s visuals to become even more colorful and exaggerated, almost like illustrations you would find in a storybook. Compared to Donkey Kong’s 3D sprites that aimed for realism, Yoshi’s Island looked almost dreamlike, as if it had been plucked from a child’s imagination.

Oddly enough, this second pitch was accepted, leading to one of the console’s most successful games, topping out at around 4 million units sold.

9. AN ABANDONED SNES ADD-ON INADVERTENTLY CREATED THE SONY PLAYSTATION.

When Sony researcher Ken Kutaragi first began paying attention to his daughter’s Famicom, America's original NES, he was disappointed. Not so much in the games it played, but in the system’s subpar sound design. This led him to go to his bosses to try and convince them to make a deal with Nintendo to build improved sound chips for their upcoming Super Nintendo.

Well it turned out to be more than that. Sony and Nintendo brokered a deal that was said to include a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES, while Sony would also produce a combined unit with both the CD drive and Super Nintendo cartridge slot built right into it, tentatively called the Play Station. Sony announced the device at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, but that’s about the last time the public really heard about it.

During CES ’91, Nintendo also announced a sudden deal with Philips to collaborate on the CD-i multimedia device behind Sony’s back. It has been reported that Nintendo soured on the deal with Sony over control and profits of the disc games. With the Philips deal making more financial sense for the company, the Sony/Nintendo partnership was effectively off, and Zelda and Mario were heading to the CD-i.

After the public announcement of the new deal, and subsequent betrayal by Nintendo, Kutaragi and Sony president Norio Ohga felt humiliated. Sony never wanted to get into video games in the first place, but when Kutaragi suggested that the company forge ahead with its own system, Ohga agreed. This resulted in a video game landscape currently dominated by Sony's PlayStation systems, and a line of cringe-worthyZelda CD-i games that Nintendo barely even acknowledges to this day.

If you want a glimpse of what could have been the start of a much different-looking video game industry, a "Nintendo Play Station" prototype was recently unearthed and demoed on The Ben Heck Show:

10. STAR FOX 2 WAS CANCELLED DESPITE BASICALLY BEING COMPLETE.

The original Star Fox was a smash hit on the SNES in 1993, offering the type of groundbreaking 3D environments that people thought were impossible at the time. So, naturally, a sequel was in order, and was slated for a 1995 release. However, the game never saw release; it was cancelled by Nintendo despite being 95 percent finished by the development team.

"It was the summer of 1995 and the PlayStation and Saturn were suddenly doing very well in Japan," Dylan Cuthbert, an Argonaut Software developer working on the game, told Nintendo Life. "I think that caught Nintendo off-guard. The decision was made because they didn't want the old-gen 3D going up against the much better 3D of the next generation, side-by-side.”

Though the game was still advanced for the SNES, it couldn’t compete with the more advanced games appearing on the market. Many of the ideas for Star Fox 2 would eventually make their way into 1997’s Star Fox 64, and after years of ROMs and emulations, Star Fox 2 officially hit shelves as part of the SNES Classic Edition.

You see them every day, on TV shows, the news, and in movies, but how well do you know the most oft-used film transitions? Here are the big five:

1. THE DISSOLVE

The dissolve is an editing technique where one clip seems to fade—or dissolve—into the next. As the first clip is fading out, getting lighter and lighter, the second clip starts fading in, becoming more and more prominent. The process usually happens so subtly and so quickly, the viewer isn't even aware of the transition. The above video offers a great overview of the cut, with examples.

2. THE WIPE

This transition is the opposite of the dissolve in that it draws attention to itself. The best example of the wipe is what's known as the Iris Wipe, which you usually find in silent films, like Buster Keaton's or the Merrie Melodies cartoons—the circle getting smaller and smaller. Other wipe shapes include stars, diamonds, and the old turning clock.

The Star Wars films are chock-full of attention-grabbing wipes. Here are two good examples from The Empire Strikes Back. The first shows the clock wipe; the second, the diagonal wipe (pay no attention to the broken blocks at the start of the second clip—that's a technical glitch, not part of the film).

3. THE CUTAWAY

As the name implies, in the basic cutaway, the filmmaker is moving from the action to something else, and then coming back to the action. Cutaways are used to edit out boring shots (like people driving to their destination—why not see what the character is seeing or even thinking sometimes?) or add action to a sequence by changing the pace of the footage. My favorite use of the cutaway is in Family Guy, where the technique is used to insert throwaway gags. Here's a great example:

4. THE L CUT

The L Cut, also called a split edit, is a very cool technique whose name dates back to the old analog film days.

The audio track on a strip of celluloid film runs along the side, near the sprocket holes. In the L Cut transition, the editor traditionally cut the picture frames out of the strip, but left the narrow audio track intact, thus creating an L-shape out of the film. A different camera angle, or scene was then spliced into the spot where the old picture was, so the audio from the old footage was now cut over the new footage.

Of course, with digital editing, one doesn't need to physically cut anything anymore, but the transition is still widely used, and the name has remained the same.

Split edits like these are especially effective in portraying conversations. Imagine how a simple conversation between two people might look if all we ever got was a ping-pong edit back and forth between the two people talking. The L cut allows the viewer to read the emotion on the listener's face, as the dialogue continues over, as we see in this clip from Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

5. THE FADE

The fade in and fade out usually signal the beginning or end of a scene, especially if the filmmaker is fading to/from black. This is the most common, of course, but fading to white has become trendy, too. The opening title sequence from the HBO series Six Feet Under featured many fades to black and a couple brief fades to white. The very last bit in the sequence fades slowly to white, and is my all-time favorite example of the transition:

For close to 90 years, Chic Young’s comic strip Blondie has been a constant in newspapers around the world, reaching an estimated 280 million readers in 55 countries. Despite its title, most readers are probably more familiar with Blondie’s husband, the sandwich-consuming Dagwood. Check out some facts about the comic’s origins, its feature film franchise, and a very unfortunate incident involving a dirty word that rocked Blondie's readership to its core.

1. BLONDIE WAS INSPIRED BY 1920S FLAPPERS.

IDW/King Features Syndicate

Before Blondie debuted in 1930, cartoonist Chic Young had attempted to create a female-driven strip without a lot of success. Titles like Beautiful Bab and Dumb Dora were some of the more unfortunate ideas, with Young preoccupied by the notion of having a vapid leading lady. For Blondie, Young initially pursued the “dumb blonde” stereotype before dialing down the chauvinism and allowing the single, mingling Blondie Boopadoop to appear at least as intelligent as the succession of boyfriends courting her in the strip. Later, Blondie would become the voice of reason [PDF] to fiance Dagwood Bumstead’s bumbling presence, inverting the gender roles of Young’s previous strips.

2. YOUNG SOLD THE STRIP BY SENDING EDITORS A PAPER DOLL OF BLONDIE IN LINGERIE.

For the debut of Blondie, Young’s syndicate, King Features, launched an aggressive mailing campaign in an effort to entice newspaper editors to pick up the strip. Editors first received a letter “announcing” the engagement of Blondie and Dagwood, which was followed by protestations from the Bumstead family and eventually a cardboard suitcase that cautioned them not to peek inside. Naturally, everyone did. Inside was a paper doll cutout of Blondie wearing lingerie, with her “wardrobe” (more paper doll clothing) included.

3. DAGWOOD WAS ORIGINALLY THE HEIR TO A RAILROAD FORTUNE.

He might strike you as incapable of tying his own shoes, but there was a time when Dagwood Bumstead carried real potential. Instead of his current working-stiff incarnation, Dagwood was originally heir to his billionaire father’s railroad fortune. But when he married Blondie in 1933, the Bumstead family effectively disowned him, fearing Blondie was only out for his money. The couple’s move to the middle class was Young’s way of acknowledging the fallout of the Great Depression.

4. DAGWOOD WENT ON A HUNGER STRIKE IN ORDER TO MARRY BLONDIE.

With the Bumstead family highly skeptical of Dagwood’s plans to marry Blondie, the would-be groom decided to earn their blessing by going on a hunger strike that played out in real time. For 28 days, Dagwood refused to eat and grew frail until his family finally consented to the marriage. The narrative stunt drew the attention of new readers, raising Blondie’s profile on the comic pages.

5. DAGWOOD AND BLONDIE SCANDALOUSLY SLEPT IN THE SAME BED.

King Features Syndicate

For a good portion of the 20th century, it was seen as proper to depict married couples on television or in comics as sleeping in twin beds, eliminating any hint of carnal activities happening off-screen. (Or in this case, off-panel.) But Young thought this was juvenile and insisted that Blondie and Dagwood appear sleeping in the same double bed. Perhaps not coincidentally, the two had their first child, Alexander, in 1934.

6. THE EARLY STRIPS HAD AN UNFORTUNATE PREOCCUPATION WITH DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.

While Blondie and Dagwood got along without incident, the same couldn’t be said for another couple featured in the strip’s early years. One of Blondie’s earlier suitors, Hiho, married girlfriend Betty and the two became supporting characters in the strip. Hiho and Betty had what could be considered a tumultuous relationship, with each threatening to punch out the other on a regular basis [PDF]. Young eventually phased the two out, replacing them with far less volatile Bumstead neighbors Herb and Tootsie Woodley.

7. DAGWOOD ENDORSED NUCLEAR POWER.

After the atomic bomb was dropped twice to bring an end to World War II, American citizens understandably grew skittish about the ramifications of wielding such power. To ease their minds, the U.S. military partnered with Young to produce 1949’s Dagwood Splits the Atom, a “fun” booklet that sees the character shrunk down in size to help readers understand atomic power and nuclear fission. Although other comic characters like Popeye appear, it’s Dagwood who has the honors of blowing a neutron into a uranium atom in order to split it.

8. YOUNG’S DEATH PROMPTED NEWSPAPERS TO DROP THE STRIP.

Although Young’s son Dean had been working on Blondie and was prepared to take over writing duties when his father passed away in 1973, newspapers weren’t so sure. According to Young, more than 600 papers canceled the strip when his father died, fearing it would suffer a drop in quality. Young persevered and eventually won over the naysayers, reclaiming space in the papers and adding several hundred more. (Currently, Young writes the strip and artist John Marshall illustrates.)

9. THE STRIP LAUNCHED 28 FEATURE FILMS.

In 1938, with Blondie firmly entrenched on the comics pages, King Features and Young agreed to license the strip to Columbia Pictures for a series of live-action feature films. The movies were shot quickly and economically with stars Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake portraying Blondie and Dagwood, respectively. The studio produced 28 features between 1938 and 1950. Attempts to adapt the comic to television were less successful. A 1954 pilot was unaired, while a 1957 series lasted just one season. Another 13-episode iteration was produced in 1968-69, with Bruce Lee appearing as a karate instructor in the last episode.

10. THE STRIP CAUGHT FLAK FOR USING A DIRTY WORD IN 2004.

With their relatively trivial subject matter, comic strips rarely have the potential to offend. A 2004 Blondie entry proved to be an exception. In the strip, a character uses the word “scumbag” to describe a baseball umpire. Readers wrote in to Dean Young to lodge complaints, with Mr. Young and his proofreaders apparently unaware that “scumbag” is a euphemism for a used prophylactic.

11. ALMOST EVERY COMIC STRIP CHARACTER AROUND DROPPED IN FOR THEIR 75TH ANNIVERSARY.

King Features Syndicate

Before shared universes were a thing, Blondie’s 75th anniversary strip published September 4, 2005 had a cameo from virtually every notable comic strip character past and present. As Dagwood and Blondie hold up a cake—shaped like a sandwich, naturally—they’re surrounded by Ziggy, Garfield, Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Dilbert, and dozens of others. In the weeks leading up to the strip, the comics pages were full of Blondie references and sight gags.